Redemption

In Redemption French feminist writer Chantal Chawaf explores the dark paths of madness and sadism, where sexuality evokes cannibalism and vampirism. The language of the body and the body of language are stripped naked in Chawaf's violently beautiful prose as she mounts this terrorist attack on the age-old theme of redemption through love.

From Publishers Weekly

Although French feminist Chawaf's ( Mother Love, Mother Earth ) work has been lauded in her native country, the appeal of her second novel doesn't translate. In a familiar Gallic strategy, it tells a story on one level and sets forth a densely self-referential philosophy of literature on another. Wandering through the Alps, artist Charles de Roquemont is tortured by recollections of Esther, the American lover he murdered several years earlier, prompted by rage that her memory still evokes. In Paris, he meets Olga Vassilieff, a screenwriter afflicted with frenzied, metaphysical writer's block as she tries in vain to create a script that will replicate the feeling of orgasm. The author devotes less attention to her improbable story than to her literary theory, a weak cocktail mixed from such academically au courant ingredients as dematerialization and the equation of speech with sexual violence. Her awkward attempts to blend the novel's two elements seem more ridiculous than provocative, as her cardboard characters rave about language, sex, art and murder while sitting on a park bench or pausing in flagrante . A stiffly literal-sounding translation doesn't help. The effect is finally that of the Marx Brothers rewriting Bataille's The Story of the Eye . Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

"As night fell, Charles became a vampire." So begins this novel of sexuality and sensuality that captures the inner thoughts and emotions of sexually impotent Charles de Roquemont, an artist and sadist who in a fit of madness savagely killed his lover and who becomes attracted to Olga Vassilieff, a screenwriter who yearns to live unrestrained, to love and be loved. The flow and metaphors of French feminist Chawaf's prose are as compelling and powerful as the passionate love and hate, pain and pleasure, and innocence and guilt of which she writes. Redemption is an intellectual and visceral novel that can be read on several levels and whose language is more important than the plot. Its brutal depiction of the human condition cannot be taken lightly, but the masterful play of language can be admired and enjoyed.- Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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